The selection of news

Phil Rosenthal, writer of the Chicago Tribune asks: “Now that people get what they want the way they want on the Internet, where does that leave those mainstream media outlets that, in traditional fashion, pair the news people want with the news it is thought they need?”

Charles Gibson, anchor of ABC World News Tonight, has an answer: The importance of the mass media, in his opinion, has not shrunk, but rather increased because of the Internet.

“You are choosing the particular kind of news that’s interesting to you,” Gibson states. We become more important because our mission is to expose you to things you wouldn’t have clicked on.”

It sounds as if someone is trying to defend an elite status, Phil Rosenthal argues, but Gibson counters, “It’s a defense of journalism. It’s not that we know better. It’s not an elitist function. It’s an editorial function. It is a function of taking a look at what’s important in diet of daily news and saying, `Here’s what I feel is important.’”

Gibson made those remarks on a day in which the whole nation was watching news of the death of Anna Nicole Smith. His broadcast, mind you, started its program with news about the increase of autism.

It is truly an interesting thesis and not to be taken slightly. Mass media was able to influence the public discourse with its selection of news for many years. Today, it tends to bring attention to news, that would certainly be left out of the conversation.

You could see it as a last charge by an industry in pressing needs to defend its powerful status. As a consumer, you can also see it as a chance to be informed about news that you would not have noticed in the massive amounts of information, or ignored altogether. The former gatekeepers can merely shift our attention to their selection of news. The public discourse is defined by others.

Works Cited:
Rosenthal, Phil. “Gibson thinks old-style news more vital now” Chicago Tribune 9 Feb. 2007. 18 Mar. 2007

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The Freedom of Speech

The “U.S. vs. Libby” lawsuit did not only put an administration and its actions in the wake of the Iraq war on trial, but featured many stars of the political media landscape on the witness stand.

I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, former top aide to Vice-President Dick Cheney was on trial for purgery and obstruction to federal investigations, but with Bob Woodward, Tim Russert, Robert Novak, Matt Cooper and Judith Miller, some of Washington’s most influential journalists were questioned about their involvement in the leak of a C.I.A. undercover agent.

In March 2002, Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador, is sent on a trip to Niger on behalf of the C.I.A. He is ordered to look for evidence that Niger sold nuclear technology to Iraq. Shortly after his return, Wilson explains that there was nothing to that story. Still, President Bush will use it as an argument to defend an invasion of Iraq in his State of the Union address on January 28, 2003. He announces that British intelligence has gathered evidence that Iraq bought significant amounts of nuclear explosives in Africa.

In July of 2003, Wilson publishes an op-ed column in The New York Times with the title “What I did not find in Africa” and erodes Washington, especially the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney and his aide Scooter Libby.

A few months prior to that, in Mai of 2003, Libby and Rove react to an article by N.Y. Times writer Nicholas Kristof, who reports that an unknown ambassador has visited Niger and could not find any connection between this country and Iraq.

In an attempt to discredit Wilson, Libby and Rove talk to several reporters and leak the name of Wison’s wife, C.I.A undercover agent Valerie Plame, who reportedly sent him on this trip. After those 15 famous words of President Bush in his State of the Union, the administration blamed the C.I.A. for the mistake.

Libby learned of this connection in May of 2003 by a state department official, but claimed during the first hearings that he lost his memory about those talks because of the flood of information that came in during this period of time.

In June of 2003, Libby talks to N.Y. Times reporter Judith Miller several times about Valerie Plame’s identity, so the charges. Leaking her identity would be present a felony.

A week earlier, Bob Woodward, writer for the Washington Post, talks to Secretary of State Richard Armitage and becomes the first to learn about Plame’s identity. Armitage admits these talks with Woodward and is not charged due to inadvertence.

Armitage will also talk to Robert Novak, who will later become the first journalist to publish the story. Bob Woodward, until this day, remains the only person involved in this issue, not to have written a single article about it. He never saw it as an important enough topic. Later on, Woodward will talk to Scooter Libby about the Wilsons.

In July of 2003, Wilson’s op-ed column is published in The New York Times and Dick Cheney gets involved in the dealings. He writes notes next to the article, questioning if the C.I.A. has done this sort of thing before: Sending an ambassador on a covert mission. He also asks in these notes if his wife might have been the one that sent him.

Scooter Libby, shortly after, talks to Ari Fleischer, then Press Secretary of the White House, about the issue and the connection to Plame and adds, that not many people would know about this. Ari Fleischer confirms this talk, but Libby claims he has never talked with Fleischer about Plame.

Thereafter, Libby meets with Judith Miller for a second time and asks her to refer to him as “former Hill staffer”, if she wanted to publish the story. This identification, and Miller’s decision not to reveal it, will put her into jail for 85 days, until Libby reveals himself to be the anonymous source. A source, that only appeared in Miller’s notebook and was never published in an article.

After his talk to Miller, Libby will also have a conversation with Tim Russert, the host of NBC’s Meet the Press. Libby now claims that he learned about the identity of Valerie Plame in this conversation. Russert denies ever talking to Libby about Plame. Shortly after, Libby also talks to Matt Cooper, writer for Newsweek, about Plame, claiming that he had heard about the rumor himself.

Later on, Libby will tell the grand jury, “I was very clear to say reporters are telling us that because in my mind I still didn’t know it as a fact. I thought I was — all I had was this information was coming in from reporters.”

On July 14, 2003, Robert Novak publishes the story that reveals the identity of Valerie Plame as a C.I.A. agent and wife of Joseph Wilson and causes a federal investigation on weather administration officials leaked her identity.

Judith Miller, who has notes about Valerie Plame, refuses to identify her sources and refers to a shield law which exists in 30 states and Washington D.C. Because the leak of an undercover agent is considered a crime, and Miller may be aiding the perpetrator, she is sentenced to jail until she reveals her source.

Now Judith Miller sees herself as defender of a whole profession. She demands her rights to protect a source, because those are vital to investigative journalism. Such a protection should exist to not scare away potential whistle blowers, no matter if a source is a good, or a bad one.

Branzburg v. Hayes announced in 1957 that a journalist had no right to protect a source if a criminal investigation depended on it. Still, the importance in this 5-4 decision was put on the minority dissent of Judge Powell who explained, that every case needed to be treated individually. He acknowledged that Branzburg v. Hayes did have its limits.

Judith Miller knew who she granted anonymity and knew, that she protected an administration that not only went to war with false information, but tried to discredit the ones who wanted the truth to be heard. One of these people is now on trial on accounts of obstruction and perjury.

Freedom of Press and protection of sources are vital for a free democracy. Without it, there would not have been a “Deep Throat” or Jeffery Wigand. However, those sources ought to be protected to serve one goal: the public’s interest.

It is questionable if the protection of Scooter Libby served in that interest. Especially in the months after the original invasion, it would have been of great importance to uncover the wrongdoings of administration officials.

Journalists need protection to do their work. But they should always remember that they do this work to serve in the public’s interest. With freedom of speech comes great responsibility.

Discussion:

1) Is Judith Miller right in arguing for protection of sources, no matter if they are good or bad ones?

2) Do you think journalists should have a special right, just as doctors or lawyers, to protect information in order to serve the public?

3) Where are the dangers in a town as Washington D.C. where every journalist depends on background informations and off-the-record statements by politicians?

Additional Information:

> Branzburg v. Hayes
> First Amendment Center on Shield Laws
> New York Times timeline about “Plamegate”
> MSNBC article about Libby’s actions

Works Cited:
Seidman, Joel. “Backstory: How the CIA leak case began” MSNBC.com 12 Jan. 2007. 11 Mar. 2007

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When the news are biased

An attentive observer could come to the conclusion that the conflict in Iraq was solved a long time ago, the next elections would still be years away and all political issues resolved. At least one will get this impression when tuning in to either MSNBC or FOX News these days.

While President Bush is announcing his “new way forward” in Iraq, presenting a new ambassador to the U.N. and a new Director of Central Intelligence, the news is reporting about what?

An objective observer will proclaim that it is almost astounding what is happening in cable news television these days, where all you can see, or hear about, is the never-ending feud between the news channels themselves.

The dispute is summed up quickly. Since its emergence in American households, Fox News proclaims that the majority of the American news establishment is liberal and therefore sees itself as counterpart and true advocate of free and balanced reporting.

Until now, CNN, MSNBC and the news staffs of the “Big Three” cared little about those propositions, but stood by and watched how Fox News and its strategy of attacking anything that seems “liberal” took over the ratings and passed the cable news competition.

In a research paper for New York University, I cited a Roper Poll of 1992, which found out that 92% of the reporting press had voted for Bill Clinton, whereas only 43% of the country did. Even though this poll is still disputed, we can safely assume that journalists tend to lean more towards the Democratic Party. The question remains if this is reflected in their coverage, and therefore influences their readership.

Furthermore, another study found out that Republican candidates for President got newspaper endorsements 86.7% of the time since 1948, whereas Democrats only received 13.3%.

To sum up, reporters tend to lean towards Democrats, their publishers tend to be more conservative. How much influence does the boss have on his employee, and how much influence does he have on his readers? At the end, no one is contented when their product is labeled partisan.

For Fox News, this strategy of attack as always worked in their favor because they could rally their viewers behind their fight against a common enemy: the liberals and their press. “Rally the troops” is not only a military term but is more often used in politics, especially in the Republican Party.

Though, the times have changed. The majority of Americans is favoring a new strategy in Iraq and Washington and Fox News is losing its enemies. The people they used to attack were, at the end, right in their observations, and the audience knows it.

Time to find new combatants, or, go back to the old ones. After years of dominating the ratings, Fox News sees itself threatened by MSNBC, which is more popular than ever.
Especially Keith Olbermann and lately Joe Scarborough lead the wave of popularity on MSNBC. As third-tier cable news channel they only saw one chance to increase their ratings, and that was to attack the leader: Fox News.

If you hate Bill O’Reilly - the successful evening host on Fox News - then we want you as our viewers. And because they were more than successful with that strategy and with everything working against Fox News in the moment, the latter has found its new enemy.

Everything started with NBC News’ announcement to officially call the conflict in Iraq a “Civil War”. Bill O’Reilly went on the attack and described all of NBC’s staff as irresponsible, liberal journalists that hate President Bush. MSNBC did not want O’Reilly to get away with it and fired on all cylinders in all their evening shows.

What transpired these next couple of days makes you feel sorry for the uninformed viewer, or even worse, for the viewer that tunes into a news show to actually hear about news. Rather than seeing a host talking about what happened around the world, the viewer saw a talking-head that prattled about another host on a different channel.
MSNBC could not be happier about the current situation, which seems like the best publicity for the smallest of the three 24/7 cable news channels.

Ultimately, they still trail Fox News in millions of viewers but find their names in every show of their rival channel. On the other side, Fox News is rejoiced because they finally found their new common enemy since their last, the Democratic Party, won the midterm election by a great margin. In the meantime they can justify their excessive patriotic and conservative coverage by shouting: the others do it as well.

The loser in this contest is the viewer and to quote myself from my research paper: “All of the media has to be challenged in their coverage, because no one can say to be fully objective in their doings. Be it by trying to defame someone else, or by hiding from the responsibilities to the public. After all, it is us who should decide what to think and how to think about it, and not some talking head on the TV screen.”

Discussion:

1) Are MSNBC and Fox News doing their audience a favor in playing a watchdog role on each other?

2) What are the dangers of a society that only hears news about how partisan the news are?

3) How can the media be saved from this battle and what would have to happen in order to do so?

Additional Information:
> Media Matter’s clips on the feud between MSNBC and Fox News
> PBS Frontline documentary “News War”
> MSNBC’s Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly’s Talking Points as Podcast

Works Cited:
Niven, David. Tilt? The Seach for Media Bias. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.
Strasser, Franz. Bias in American Media. New York University. New York, N.Y., April 2006.

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Media re-discovers Iraq

In 2006, the Tyndall Report notices a bigger coverage of the Iraq war in the American media than in 2005. Hurricane Katrina also is still among the leaders in the battle for airtime minutes.

For 20 years, the report of Andrew Tyndall measures each evening which topics get the most coverage among the three leading evening news broadcasts and outlines the results in a yearly balance sheet.

While Hurricane Katrina topped that list in 2005 with 1,153 total airtime minutes on ABC World News, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News, and was leading the Iraq war, it only got the attention of 367 minutes in 2006 and finished third in the standings. Interestingly enough, with 190 minutes NBC devoted way more attention to the recovering of the region than CBS with merely 75 minutes.

Hurricane Katrina especially had to give way to the coverage of the ongoing struggle of American forces in Iraq. While the coverage of that conflict steadily declined each year since the invasion in 2003 (1,602 min. in 2003, 1,352 in 2004, 879 in 2005), it rose back to 1,131 minutes in 2006 and lead the field with a big gap to the Israel-Hezbollah conflict which came in second with 578 minutes. Iraq-related topics like sectarian violence (187 min.) and the attacks on journalists (170 min.) finished seventh and eight in the 2006 ranking.

In general, it was the Tsunami in South-east Asia, the death of Pope John Paul II, and the bombing attacks in London that got most of the coverage in American evening news programs in 2005. Last year, however, the attention is more on national topics like the aftermath of 9/11, the rise of gasoline prices, and the debate about illegal immigrants.

The nuclear weapons program of North Korea received 30 minutes more attention than the efforts of the Iranian President to start one. The biggest difference among the three channels was the coverage of the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. NBC Nightly News reported 73 minutes about the games, whereas CBS only devoted 4 total minutes. NBC had the exclusive rights and Nightly News-Anchorman Brian Williams reported some of the shows live from Italy.

How much the Iraq war is back in the awareness of news shows and therefore the public, becomes clear when you look at the airtime of the individual correspondents on those programs. Richard Engel, Baghdad- and Beirut-correspondent of NBC is the only international correspondent among the Top 15 of all three news channels and their reporters. In 2004, two international reporters made that list - none of them did in 2005.

David Martin (CBS) and Jim Miklaszewski (NBC) are two prominent Pentagon-correspondents in the Top 5, whereas this group only got one of their peers in the Top 15 in 2005 (Martha Raddatz (ABC) on No. 11). The most airtime, as always, went to the three White House correspondents of the major networks.

It should come to no surprise that the conflict in Iraq is back in the minds of the press. After three years of declining coverage, the major networks and cable news shows have realized that this conflict is not anywhere near to being solved and that a lot of decision-makers have simply made the wrong decisions for many years. Finally, one could argue, those mistakes get the coverage they deserve.

Still, there are a lot of questions that need to be asked, starting with why one can see a decreasing coverage over the years and what went different from 2003 to 2005 that justified such a decline. At the end, it is debatable if a turnaround in the media could have prevented such mistakes from happening for this long period of time by making the public aware of it.

In conclusion, one finds that neither side is looking like a winner in this story. While one side got into this crisis and currently tries desperately to get out of it, the other side recognized this crisis too late and is now anxious to catch up on what it missed. The criticism appears late, but at least it appears.

Discussion:

1) How do you explain a decline in the coverage of the Iraq conflict from 2003 to 2005 and should the media be held accountable for “missing the story”?

2) Is it surprising that national issues got most of the coverage in 2006, whereas there seemed to be a bigger focus on international news in 2005?

3) What influence does the media have on decision makers and do you believe a better reporting about the wrong-doings would have prevented some of them from happening?

Additional Information:
> Tyndall Report Website with archive to search for topics and people
> Electronic Iraq’s view on Tyndall’s findings
> Worldpress.org Top Ten Stories of 2006

Works Cited:
Tyndall, Andrew. “Tyndall Report 3 Jan. 2007. 4 Jan. 2007 

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Journalists at War

Each Sunday, Tim Russert, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, interviews the most influential politicians and most important press members in his Sunday talk show and it should come to no surprise that there is only one topic since the mid-term elections: Iraq.

In a recent episode, Russert talked to two columnists of The New York Times, David Broooks and Tom Friedman, about the current situation in the Middle East and their latest columns in which they paint a dark picture of the future of this critical part of the world.

Especially Tom Friedman gave some of the most distinct bullet points about the conflict in which he did not mince matters and illustrated the kind of dilemma journalists are facing while covering this national identity crisis.

On the question if we can even assess the situation, he answered: “They [the Iraqis] want justice before democracy. The Shiites want justice for the last 30 years. The Kurds want justice. The Sunnis want justice for a war that overturned their dominance. My fear about Iraq right now and the reason I wrote that column is that I get the sense that our vision of Iraq, a democratic, or democratizing pluralistic Iraq, is everyone’s second choice there.”

While American soldiers risk their lives each day to bring democracy to the Iraqi people, this would be one goal, but not the most important goal for the people there. Certainly an argument which most Bush-critics are pointing out these days. It is not the Americans that decide about the future of this country, but the Iraqis themselves. It is vital that they want democracy more than anything, because no military power can force it onto them.

About the issue weather we can call the conflict a “civil war”, Friedman argues: “We had a civil war in our country. We had a civil war because we thought some people in our country believed really bad things. Really bad things about human dignity and equality, about the right of one people to enslave another. They’re having a civil war in Iraq, only it’s not about ideas, it’s about tribal issues. There is no Abe Lincoln there. It’s the South vs. the South, that’s the problem with the fight right now.”

On the question what the Iraq conflict means to the rest of the region, he goes on, “if you step back, look at what’s been going on there for the last year. In Iran, they just had a conference on why the Holocaust didn’t happen. In Iraq, you have people fighting over who is the proper heir to the prophet Mohammed. And in Syria, basically, the government of Syria killed the prime minister next door, and wants to get off with a parking ticket. This is a freak show, OK? There’s no other part of the world that’s behaving like this.”

Iran is supporting the Shiite militia, Saudis are concerned about the Sunni minority and threaten with an invasion if the Americans should leave them behind, and the Kurds in Northern Iraq have banned the Iraqi flag and consider themselves a self-governed state.

This is where David Brooks jumps in and explains to Tim Russert, “A great historian, Michael Oren, says there are three authentic nation states in the Middle East: Turkey, Iran and Egypt. All the rest are phony nations. Sometimes with family—run by families with armies. And that’s—that is fragile. And that could all come undone and that could all be part of the spreading wave of chaos.”

In the week of the interview, First Lady Laura Bush and former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, criticized the media for focusing only on the bad news about Iraq and sending a wrong impression to the American people.

Friedman in defense of his coverage, “I wanted this to succeed, you know, as much as anybody, because I thought it was really important. But I thought it was really important and really hard. And to me, what history will damn these people for is they thought it was really important and really easy.”

And Brooks, asked about his journalist-colleagues on the ground in Iraq, adds, “They’re not biased about this. They want the best for the Iraqi people, they want democracy. Listen to what they’re reporting, they’re reporting chaos. You have 100–I don’t know what it is, 1.6 million people leaving Iraq. You’ve got 9,000 Iraqis every week who are moving to their Shiite homeland, or to their Sunni homeland. This is a country—it’s not civil war, it’s just disintegration. So the idea that this is some media concoction, you—I said that a year ago, two years ago. But at some point, face reality.”

At the end, we should face reality and take it for what it is. It is not the Americans who can solve this crisis, but the people that want to live in this region peacefully. And when an administration sees no way out but to blame the media for their reporting, then you know the times are bad.

Discussion:

1) What are the difficulties journalists face when reporting about a national crisis overseas and how can they avoid to focus on bad news only, but report accurately?

2) Should Tom Friedman and David Brooks be as open as they are about their reporting style or could that lead towards a credibility problem with their readers?

3) How does the element of embedded journalists add to the dangers of reporting from a war zone?

Additional Information:

> AP Story about Embedded Journalists
> Baghdad Correspondent Richard Engel’s War Zone Diary
> NBC’s Meet the Press

Works Cited:
“MTP Transcript for Dec. 17″ MSNBC.com 17 Dec. 2006. 27 Dec. 2006

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News without the filter

The so-called “citizen journalism”, in which normal citizens mutate to journalists with their cell-phone cameras, made another step forward lately. First, CNN started “I-Report”, in which it asks viewers to upload videos and photos to the CNN website, and now Yahoo and Reuters have started a partnership called “You Witness”.

The idea is the same. When someone takes a picture of snow chaos on the highway, or shoots some video footage during a protest in Lebanon, he can send this material to those portals and then they are either shown on websites or make it into the evening news on CNN.

This is another try, so a statement by Reuters, to convert viewers into “on-the-spot journalists”. Hereby, Yahoo seems to have a slight advantage towards traditional news agencies because of its already existing ties to a large, active Internet community. Flickr, a website for photo-uploads, which also belongs to Yahoo, is supposed to play a vital role in the overall “You Witness” concept. With Reuters, it seems like this project gained a serious distribution partner.

To people who ask themselves if they even have a chance to make the cut as an amateur in this profession, Yahoo and CNN already have an answer. Yahoo offers a small video course, in which the audience can learn about simple, but vital techniques. CNN helps out and lists which topics are of major interest to the news desk.

Whereas the videos are certainly not convincing, yet, due to a lack of professionalism, the pictures are an enrichment, and receive great feedback in the coverage of CNN TV. Even in Germany, RTL advertises its “Handy Reporter” segment in front of every news show, in which people can receive 100 EUR for every published photo and 500 EUR for every video broadcast on air.

At CNN, however, you get nothing for your effort, and Reuters and Yahoo are debating about how to pay off their best content providers.

In the near future, Yahoo wants to focus more on local issues and is promoting pictures and videos of high school sports. The “on-the-spot journalist” could also write articles about the latest game. Compensation will certainly become an even bigger issue with this strategy.

But even if no money is offered, it seems as if those projects will soon be part of mainstream media. Many authors of weblogs are already providing important and influential content and get no reward for it. This step is just taking the idea of print into the visual market. The result is a world with a better flow of information in which its citizens can identify more with “their” world and “their” news.

Stories will not go through the filter of media conglomerates, but go from source to receiver without any detour. An important step to a better understanding.

Discussion:

1) What are advantages and disadvantages of normal citizens reporting the news to each other?

2) Is “citizen journalism” as direct as advertised, or do new filters and gatekeepers appear in the process?

3) Is the idea by CNN and Yahoo limited to local topics because of the limited range of reporting by its contributors?

Additional Information:

> I-Report Portal
> Huffington on new citizen journalism portal Assignement Zero
> Washington Post’s Leslie Walker on Citizen Journalism
> OJR’s Mark Glaser on Hyperlocal Citizen Media

Works Cited:
Auchard, Eric. “Yahoo partners with Reuters on eyewitness pictures” Reuters 4 Dec. 2006. 11 Jan. 2007

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The call for words

On November 28, 2006, the Los Angeles Times, NBC and MSNBC decided to not any longer call the conflict in Iraq “sectarian violence” but in fact a “civil war”.

With this decision both companies take, as they describe it, a big step towards the right direction. They call “it” like it is and no longer follow the orders by the U.S. administration that does not like to say the word out loud, rather read it somewhere in print.

NBC News argues that, “after careful consideration, NBC News has decided a change in terminology is warranted, that the situation in Iraq with armed militarized factions fighting for their own political agendas can now be characterized as civil war.” The L.A. Times followed NBC’s lead shortly after and several TV-stations, with the exception of Fox News, have all switched to “civil war” as the major description for the conflict in Iraq.

Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times about his paper’s strategy: “We expect to use the phrase sparingly and carefully, not to the exclusion of other formulations, not for dramatic effect. The main shortcoming of “civil war” is that, like other labels, it fails to capture the complexity of what is happening on the ground. The war in Iraq is, in addition to being a civil war, an occupation, a Baathist insurgency, a sectarian conflict, a front in a war against terrorists, a scene of criminal gangsterism and a cycle of vengeance. We believe ‘civil war’ should not become reductionist shorthand for a war that is colossally complicated.”

The question that now comes to most people’s mind is: Why did it take so long?

One could argue that, after definition, it is not a civil war as long as there is an administration in power. Furthermore, most U.S. administration officials have pointed out that most conflicts are in the area around Baghdad. To call it a countrywide civil war would be misleading.

Why the Bush government does not like the term, is obvious. It describes the failure of the American mission in Iraq. Moreover, it adds to the opinion of a growing majority that wands to see a pullout of Iraq in the near future. Why should American forces stay in a country, which conflict it is not able to solve.

These people voted with convincing majority for Nancy Pelosi and her Democratic Party in the last midterm elections and gave them a majority in both U.S. Congress and the Senate. And because of this election result, the American media has the heart to use the term “civil war” openly because they do not have to fear anymore to count as “liberal biased.” They now merely speak out what the majority is thinking.

But is the public rightly served, now that things are called for what they are? Roy Peter Clark, senior scholar at the Poynter Institute points out that the term “civil war”, just as “sectarian violence”, does not adequately capture this complicated situation, either. “The violence comes from Americans, from civilians, from militia, from various Muslim sects (against foreigners and each other), from mercenaries, from criminal gangs, from foreign jihadists,” Clark exlains. “It is less the job of the foreign correspondent to summarize information in abstract language than to report in concrete and specific terms on what is happening.”

“Words matter,” argues Clarence Page, author of the Chicago Tribune. “They shape our perceptions and perceptions shape our politics and, ultimately, government policy.” It seems simple to introduce a term but a real challenge to use it properly.

Ultimately, only history will judge, not only President Bush and his decisions, but the right choice of words to describe them. After all, as Clark points out, the American Civil War used to be the “War Between the States” and the “First World War” only received its title after the Second.

“Journalists remain scribblers of the first rough draft of history,” Clark asserts. They need to learn to make a decision. Always considering to describe their surroundings as accurately and nonpartisan as possible.

Discussion:

1) What are the dangers by calling a conflict a certain term too early and when does the journalist therefore actively head a debate?

2) Do you have other explanations why the news outlets made such a tough choice by labeling the conflict in Iraq?

3) When do words struggle to adequately describe a scenario and what happens in those situations?

Additional Information:

> N.Y. Times’ Tom Zeller Jr. on the decision
> Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter welcomes the decision
> Video clips of reactions via Media Matters

Works Cited:
Clark, Roy Peter. “Civil War and Civil Language: Word Choice and the Newsroom” Poynter Online 28 Nov. 2006. 8 Dec. 2006
Gold, Matea. “NBC to use ‘civil war’ to describe Iraq” Los Angeles Times 28 Nov. 2006. 8 Dec. 2006
Kurtz, Howard. “The C-Word” washingtonpost.com 29 Nov. 2006. 8 Dec. 2006
Page, Clarence. “Civil words over a civil war in Iraq” Chicago Tribune 29 Nov. 2006. 8 Dec. 2006

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When newspapers subside

In July of 2006, the German publication Der Spiegel wrote, that the New York Times Company would narrow their historic paper by 1.5 inches by 2008. With the re-design the paper would cut 250 jobs in the production, the company announced.

With this slimming diet, the paper will lose 11 percent of its content. While executive editor Bill Keller quickly added that they would add a few pages, it still remains official that the New York Times will shrink by about 5 percent, which will also effect reporting and the style of writing.

Aside from the fact that slimmer papers are easier to handle, this move is a frightening development in the industry with several repercussions.

Apparently, it illustrates the desperate moves by an industry in one of its biggest crises. The move towards the Internet still does not level the losses in print. While publications such as the Los Angeles Times and USA Today made similar steps in the past, it is always different if the leader of the pack is forced to adjust.

In the past, The New York Times became famous for its long, well researched articles, that will now be cut under the belittlement of the paper. That means less space for elaborate reports, less space to give each side a strong voice. Ultimately, less space for the reader to develop a well understood opinion.

“It’s painful to watch an industry retrench,” Keller explains. “But this is a much less painful way to go about assuring our economic survival than cutting staff or closing foreign bureaus or retrenching our investigative reporting or diluting the Washington bureau.”

Surely, he is right in stating that the closing of foreign bureaus is a development that needs to be stopped. Where though, is the foreign correspondent supposed to write on if the international news sections are more and more taken over by national news because the latter is explained easier and therefore needs less space?

“It’s an insult to the people doing substance here,” an anonymous staff member of the paper tells the New York Observer. In this article, another Times member waives off the importance of the move. We would not read 95 percent of the paper anyway, so why bother about the loss of 5 percent?

In the top left of the front page of The New York Times it still states: “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” Let’s hope there is less to report in the future.

Discussion:

1) Is the outcry about the company’s announcement justified and how much should we pay attention to the crisis of the news industry?

2) Do you see a pattern in the closings of foreign bureaus and the cutting of staff and when does that become a danger to us readers?

3) How much can a company justify editorial decisions with economic reasons and at what point do we have to ask ourselves how much good reporting is worth to us?

Additional Information:

> Romanesko’s daily overview of the media industry
> N.Y. Times’ Media & Advertising section
> Center for Media Literacy on Media Industry and Economics
> CJR’s panel on the future of newspapers (mp3)

Works Cited:
“‘New York Times’ wird schlanker” Spiegel Online 18 Jul. 2006. 24 Sep. 2006
Scocca, Tom; Sherman, Gabriel. “Times’ Angry Inch: Latest Vogue Slices Paper Coulter-Thin” NYO 24 Jul. 2006. 14 Jan. 2007
Seelye, Katharine Q. “Times to Reduce Page Size And Close a Plant in 2008″ The New York Times 18 Jul. 2006. 24 Sep. 2006

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